Shipyard Melonhead | Shipyard Brewing Company

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Overall: If you like the other fruit beers from Shipyard, this one should not disappoint. I find this way better than the pumpkin, but not as good as the apple as the melon here is sweet but not overpowering. If I am going for a watermelon beer, it will still be 21st Ammendment's but this one is a solid beer for a summer's day.

Pours pale golden orange with a slightly hazed body finely carbonated bubbles form in a large white head. Speckled sporadic lacing is left behind. Aroma has candy like notes of watermelon think Jolly Rancher, soft notes bready grains. Flavor is interesting rides the palate with sweet candy tones of watermelon, finishes with dry yeast notes and ample breadiness comes from the base ale weighing at 4.4% abv. Something about each sip becomes cloying, the sweet notes really hang on and it just becomes too much for me with each sip. There's a much cleaner yeast profile here than found in most Shipyard Ales. Mouthfeel is light to medium bodied fine bubbled carbonation, like I said the natural flavoring weighs too cloying on my palate and leaves me not wanting to finish this particular offering. Definitely not an overall good sign when you don't want to finish the beer, this will be popular with the masses. The only other watermelon beer I've had has been from Roy Pitz their Watermelon Lager is much more drinkable than this one.

12 oz bottle.
Tasty but artificial watermelon flavor with strong hints of cherries and strawberries. I would not be surprised if this was actually crafted with natural watermelon but had cherry and strawberry added to bring out the fruitiness. In any case, it is quite fruity, as well as lightly sweet with just a modicu of tartness.

This beer us a very clear and bright dark yellow that almost sneaks into amber territeory, with lots of spritzy bubbles rising well after the head has fallen. Speaking of, it's pure white and fizzy, rising to between a half and full finger and falling back down quickly. It looks more like a soda than a beer, but at least some big bubbles on the sides and wispy stuff in the middle remain, though they only have enough substance to leave tiny spots here and there.
Watermelon does come out in the nose, and pretty strongly. It has a candy-like sweetness at first, but that backs down for more tartness to come out. Some malts are also noticeable.
It is what it is, a refreshing, light, summer beer with fruit. Interestingly, it's much more identifiable as beer in the taste. Crackery malts form a foundation, though it's a little musty and grainy, and there's a floral note too. It's actually somewhat bitter, even. Some weird metallic note slides into the finish, but not too much, though an aspirin-like note follows it.
There's obviously focused on lightness and crispness, and that it has. It's a little weak and shallow, but it quenches the thirst.
Shipyard confuses me with their massive shifts in quality from one beer to another.

12oz bottle - so, another fruit beer whose only indicator of said fruit adjunct is, um, 'flavor', at the very end of the not so helpful ingredient list.

This beer pours a clear, medium golden yellow colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat fizzy dirty white head, which leaves a bit of low-lying coral reef atoll lace around the glass as it quickly blows off.

It smells of candied watermelon and honeydew (think Starburst), those cellophane-wrapped sugary strawberry things, grainy pale malt, and a touch of earthy and unpleasantly musty green hop bitters. The taste is more of the same - sugary and candy-like watermelon, strawberry, and cantaloupe/honeydew fruitiness, some wan wheaten cereal malt, and pretty much nothing in the way of offsetting hop bitterness that is overt, but you gotta expect that it's there somewhere, in a quotidian background role.

The carbonation is quite forward in its palate-taunting frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and mostly smooth, with a nice airy creaminess arising shortly after things start to warm up a tad. It finishes well off-dry, the mixed melon fruitiness barely wavering at all, y'all!

Overall, this is enjoyable enough, I suppose, if you've got a melon candy sweet tooth hard-on, or the like, and want it fawning all over yer brew. For the rest of us, however, I'll leave the sweet bonbons to my toddler, while daddy goes and kills a real beer, one with hops that are not at all ashamed to be a large part of the show.

Appearance: Clear deep gold. Full pillowy white head. Average retention/limited lacing.
Aroma: A slice of watermelon with the rind.
Flavor: Mainly watermelon, but with some other melons as well, and some golden malt. There's a note of sweetness, but it's not sweet. A firm bitterness comes through. Very much the same from start to finish, just diminishing.
Mouthfeel: Medium in body. Median, slightly lower than standard carbonation level.
Overall: Clean, pleasant, and refreshing. Sweetish but not over-done with about as authentic of a watermelon flavor as you can get - I've actually had a beer that was made with hundreds of pounds of crushed watermelon juices and it was no more authentic than this. It's not complex, but neither is it intended to be. No, this one-trick-pony does only one trick, but it does it well!